More Questions Surface About DCP's Use of Sources

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_Kishkumen
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Re: More Questions Surface About DCP's Use of Sources

Post by _Kishkumen »

Here is Peterson's "Text and Context" for your own perusal:

http://maxwellinstitute.BYU.edu/publications/review/?vol=6&num=1&id=147

I quote it at greater length:

Daniel Peterson wrote:But let's not waste time on such silly name-calling. What of the logic of argumentation? The uneven but fascinating book Degenerate Moderns: Modernity as Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior, by E. Michael Jones, will serve as an example of the logically legitimate use of ad hominem analysis.42 With learning and passion, Jones shows repeatedly how certain influential theories, writings, and works of art—among them several that substantially define the cultural environment in which we now live—grew organically from the often warped and immoral lives of those who produced them. This should hardly come as a surprise. No less a figure than the great William James had already argued in his essay "The Will to Believe" against the myth that anyone—even anyone affiliated with Signature Books—chooses his attitude toward issues of cosmic or life-orientational significance on the basis of pure, abstract reason alone. But Jones goes further. With great plausibility, he reads Margaret Mead's now discredited account of an idyllic Samoan paradise of guiltless free love as an implicit defense of her own marital infidelities. He shows that Sigmund Freud's theories are intimately related to the first psychoanalyst's own sexual urges and sexual sins. Pablo Picasso's paintings image the artist's checkered sexual career. Even Alfred Kinsey's studies of human sexuality, purportedly based on hard statistical data but now known to be far wide of the mark, seem to have been distorted to a great extent by Kinsey's own (possibly homosexual, certainly odd) personality. "Far from being two mutually exclusive compartments hermetically sealed off from each other, the intellectual life turns out to be a function of the moral life of the thinker."43

And, through it all, on the part of the intellectuals discussed, there runs a solid thread of hostility toward religion—and toward its moral demands. Sometimes this hostility took the shape of formal critique: "Freud, we are told with a tendentiousness that suffuses [Peter] Gay's entire biography, 'sharply differentiat[ed] the scientific style of thought from the Illusion-ridden style of religious thinking'. . . 'Science,' Gay tells us, 'is an organized effort to get beyond childishness. Science disdains the pathetic effort of the believer to realize fantasies through pious waiting and ritual performances, through sending up petitions and burning heretics.' "44 Jones sees the period of secularization following the French Revolution as crucial. "The intellectual," he says, "is a peculiarly modern invention, whose rise is predicated upon the demise of the Church as a guide to life."45 In the weakest chapter of his book (weak because too heavily colored by his own seemingly Counterreformation Catholicism), Jones briefly discusses the career of Martin Luther. While his analysis here is not wholly convincing, the model he proposes is abundantly documented in his book as a whole: "Throughout the second decade of the sixteenth century, Luther became involved in a spiritual downward spiral in which, as is the case with an embodied spirit, spiritual laxity led to sensuality, which in turn led to intellectual rebellion against the discipline of the Church, which led to further sensual decline and further rage against the Church that upheld the standards he soon felt no longer capable of keeping."46


And:

Daniel Peterson wrote:In the brilliant third chapter of Degenerate Moderns, entitled "Homosexual as Subversive," E. Michael Jones demonstrates the crucial and explanatory role of personal lifestyle not only in the traitorous career of Sir Anthony Blunt, but in the theories of John Maynard Keynes, the biographical writings of Lytton Strachey, and the novels of E. M. Forster. "Modernity was the exoteric version of Bloomsbury biography; it was a radically homosexual vision of the world and therefore of its very nature subversive; treason was its logical outcome. . . . The Bloomsberries' public writings—Keynes' economic theories, Strachey's best-selling Eminent Victorians, etc.—were the sodomitical vision for public consumption."55 Reflecting upon the development of the characters in Forster's long-suppressed book, Maurice, Jones notes that, "In the world of this novel it's hard to tell whether declining religious faith fosters homosexuality or whether homosexuality kills faith. At any rate Forster sees a connection. . . . As their involvement in sodomy increases, so also does their opposition to Christianity."56 That denial of the truths one can know about God should lead to sodomy is in some sense a mystery," concludes Jones. "However, it is a mystery that can be fairly well documented, from Paul's epistle to the Romans to any objective view of modern British history."57 In any event, it seems clear that immorality (not merely of the homosexual variety) and intellectual apostasy are, and always have been, frequent (though not invariable) companions. (Joseph Smith's famous announcement of a link between adultery and sign-seeking is apropos here.)58 Sodom and Cumorah are apparently not compatible.


I'd be interested to know what prompted extended quotations of an infamous, virulent anti-Semite in the FARMS Review. This has got to be the most bizarre and objectionable garbage I have ever read in an LDS publication, and it is both freely and publicly available through BYU! Someone needs to remove this material before the situation spins out of control.

Edited to add: I am informed that it was not known that Jones was an anti-Semite at the time. OK. I don't think his ludicrously bigoted and idiotic views about homosexuality are defensible either, but there you have it.
Last edited by Guest on Sat Jan 14, 2012 5:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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_Kishkumen
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Re: More Questions Surface About DCP's Use of Sources

Post by _Kishkumen »

So am I to understand that Daniel Peterson is offering the anti-Semite conspiracy theorist Eugene Michael Jones as a model for the effective, nay compelling, and proper use of the ad hominem argument?

What gives here?

I find this really troubling.
"Petition wasn’t meant to start a witch hunt as I’ve said 6000 times." ~ Hanna Seariac, LDS apologist
_Morley
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Re: More Questions Surface About DCP's Use of Sources

Post by _Morley »

Kishkumen wrote:So am I to understand that Daniel Peterson is offering the anti-Semite conspiracy theorist Eugene Michael Jones as a model for the effective, nay compelling, and proper use of the ad hominem argument?

What gives here?

I find this really troubling.


Amen.
_Doctor Scratch
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Re: More Questions Surface About DCP's Use of Sources

Post by _Doctor Scratch »

Kishkumen wrote:I'd be interested to know what prompted extended quotations of an infamous, virulent anti-Semite in the FARMS Review. This has got to be the most bizarre and objectionable garbage I have ever read in an LDS publication, and it is both freely and publicly available through BYU! Someone needs to remove this material before the situation spins out of control.


It has been sitting there for years. I'm ashamed that no one has spoken up about it until now. I hate to think that nothing will be done about it, though I fear that this will be the outcome of our calling attention to this travesty.

C'mon, Dan. Do the right thing.
"[I]f, while hoping that everybody else will be honest and so forth, I can personally prosper through unethical and immoral acts without being detected and without risk, why should I not?." --Daniel Peterson, 6/4/14
_angsty
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Re: More Questions Surface About DCP's Use of Sources

Post by _angsty »

I often claim to be immune to embarrassment. Apparently I am not. I can be embarrassed for other people, and I am really, really embarrassed for Dr. Peterson.

This is so bizarre. Doesn't Dr. Peterson have an undergrad in Philosophy? Has he not taken introductory logic? I'm stunned.
_hans castorp
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Re: More Questions Surface About DCP's Use of Sources

Post by _hans castorp »

In all fairness to Dr. Peterson, at the time (1994) when both Degenerate Moderns and DCP's article were published, Jones was not as (openly, at least) antisemitic as he has since become. He then occupied a peculiar position on the Catholic Right, sniping at both "modernists" of all kinds and the Lefebvrites in the Society of St. Pius X.

From the beginning, EMJ's focus has been on finding hidden motivations for the actions of his enemies, but the Der Stuermer-type stuff he now purveys is much, much worse than what he was doing in 1994.
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_Morley
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Re: More Questions Surface About DCP's Use of Sources

Post by _Morley »

hans castorp wrote:In all fairness to Dr. Peterson, at the time (1994) when both Degenerate Moderns and DCP's article were published, Jones was not as (openly, at least) antisemitic as he has since become. He then occupied a peculiar position on the Catholic Right, sniping at both "modernists" of all kinds and the Lefebvrites in the Society of St. Pius X.

From the beginning, EMJ's focus has been on finding hidden motivations for the actions of his enemies, but the Der Stuermer-type stuff he now purveys is much, much worse than what he was doing in 1994.

Good point. However, the advantage to publishing to the worldwide interwebs is that web pages are living things. They can (and should) be edited as new information becomes available.
_Blixa
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Re: More Questions Surface About DCP's Use of Sources

Post by _Blixa »

hans castorp wrote:In all fairness to Dr. Peterson, at the time (1994) when both Degenerate Moderns and DCP's article were published, Jones was not as (openly, at least) antisemitic as he has since become. He then occupied a peculiar position on the Catholic Right, sniping at both "modernists" of all kinds and the Lefebvrites in the Society of St. Pius X.

From the beginning, EMJ's focus has been on finding hidden motivations for the actions of his enemies, but the Der Stuermer-type stuff he now purveys is much, much worse than what he was doing in 1994.


Thanks for the perspective.

Whatever recent antisemitic spiral Jones's work has taken, Degenerate Moderns and its use under discussion here, are still enough for me. After all, we're still dealing with an attempt to ascribe "hidden motivations for the actions of ... enemies" rather than reasoned intellectual discussion.
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_Morley
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Re: More Questions Surface About DCP's Use of Sources

Post by _Morley »

Blixa wrote:
Thanks for the perspective.

Whatever recent antisemitic spiral Jones's work has taken, Degenerate Moderns and its use under discussion here, are still enough for me. After all, we're still dealing with an attempt to ascribe "hidden motivations for the actions of ... enemies" rather than reasoned intellectual discussion.


You're right.

This is especially salient, since the charge of ‘hidden motivations’ is one that Daniel is very sensitive about when suggested about apologists.
_Doctor Scratch
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Re: More Questions Surface About DCP's Use of Sources

Post by _Doctor Scratch »

Blixa wrote:
hans castorp wrote:In all fairness to Dr. Peterson, at the time (1994) when both Degenerate Moderns and DCP's article were published, Jones was not as (openly, at least) antisemitic as he has since become. He then occupied a peculiar position on the Catholic Right, sniping at both "modernists" of all kinds and the Lefebvrites in the Society of St. Pius X.

From the beginning, EMJ's focus has been on finding hidden motivations for the actions of his enemies, but the Der Stuermer-type stuff he now purveys is much, much worse than what he was doing in 1994.


Thanks for the perspective.

Whatever recent antisemitic spiral Jones's work has taken, Degenerate Moderns and its use under discussion here, are still enough for me. After all, we're still dealing with an attempt to ascribe "hidden motivations for the actions of ... enemies" rather than reasoned intellectual discussion.


Indeed. Even if Jones's anti-semitism didn't become fully visible until later, the fact remains that DCP was using this book to (1) defend his use of ad hominem attack, and (2) to suggest that books written by homosexuals are somehow "tainted." As I recall, there is that passage in his essay where he adduces Hugh Nibley's suggestion that Korihor was actually a "sodomite," and that this was the reason for Korihor's turning against the Church. It just doesn't get anymore whacked-out than that.
"[I]f, while hoping that everybody else will be honest and so forth, I can personally prosper through unethical and immoral acts without being detected and without risk, why should I not?." --Daniel Peterson, 6/4/14
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